Technical Field of the Invention
This invention relates structured light illumination and in particular to systems and methods for implementing structured light illumination with frame subwindows.
Description of Related Art
Structured light illumination (SLI) is a known method for extracting 3D surface information. Current SLI systems consist of a projector that projects an SLI pattern onto a 3D object while one or more cameras capture images of large areas of the 3D object. This design presents a number of challenges to miniaturization and cost reduction, namely projector size and camera cost. Cameras that are capable of imaging large areas in high resolution do not necessarily have a fast frame rate, introducing a problem when the 3D object has movement. Although the cameras can be quite small, they still require an optical path length to the 3D object proportional to the width of the image area. This optical path length also holds true for the DLP projector as well. A typical DLP projector is also physically significant in size. All of these factors contribute to a larger system size than would be practical for a portable SLI system.
Furthermore, fast, high resolution cameras have a significant cost. The cameras may also require more expensive, high bandwidth connections to the processor such as Firewire and Camera Link. DLP projectors can also be a significant expense.
As such, there is a need for an improved SLI system with fast, high resolution image capture that is operable with moving 3D objects and has a reduced size and cost.